Washington Dc, United States, March 21 2025:President Donald Trump stops to speak with media before boarding Marine 1.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs are controversial, not only because they have raised prices on widely-used consumer goods but because they have failed to cause the manufacturing renaissance that the Republican promised. In fact, when Trump recently claimed that America is experiencing a manufacturing boom, a journalist asked the White House to back it up — and they could not do so.
“‘We have the largest number of plants ever being built in the United States right now,’ Trump says,” CNN journalist Daniel Dale posted on X on Monday. “When I asked the White House for any source for this claim, they could not provide any. US factory construction spending has steadily declined this term.”
Dale also cited the Federal Reserve’s statistics which note that while $250,089,000,000 was spent in total manufacturing construction in November 2024 (when Trump won his second election), that number dropped to $172,674,000,000 in June 2026.
Speaking with AlterNet in July, Dr. Robert Shapiro — undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the administration of President Bill Clinton and principal economic adviser to Clinton's 1992 campaign — broke down how Trump’s tariffs have hurt rather than helped American manufacturing.
“It's about uncertainty,” Shapiro told AlterNet. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”
He continued, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”
